Here’s our Q2’2024 quarterly platforms update.  If you’re new to these updates, welcome!  This update aims to share recent changes as well as our best current knowledge on upcoming changes, but predicting the future is tricky business and this shouldn’t be considered a committed roadmap. 

With that said, on to the update…

InterSystems IRIS Production Operating Systems and CPU Architectures

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

• Recent Changes
  • Red Hat threw a lifeline to customers struggling to upgrade from RHEL 7 by announcing 4 years of Extended Life Cycle Support starting July 1, 2024.
• Upcoming Changes
  • We expect Red Hat to release RHEL 9.4 & 8.10 any day now.  Once these minor OS changes are released, we’ll begin minor OS certification for them on IRIS 2024.1.
  • The next major update for RHEL will be RHEL 10 which is expected in Q2 of 2025.
• Further reading: RHEL Release Page

Ubuntu

• Recent Changes
  • Support for Ubuntu 24.04 was added in IRIS 2024.1.0.267.2 on May 15, less than three weeks after Ubuntu 24.04 was released.
  • Now that Ubuntu 24.04 is available, IRIS 2024.1 will be the last major version that supports Ubuntu 20.04.  IRIS 2024.2 will only be available for Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04.
• Further Reading: Ubuntu Releases Page

SUSE Linux

• Upcoming Changes
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP6 is expected late Q2 or early Q3.  Details of what’s included are still emerging.
• Previous Updates
  • Minor OS certification has been completed for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP5 without problems.  SP5 includes Linux Kernel 5.14.21, OpenSSL 3.0.8, and Python 3.11.
  • General Support from SUSE for Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3 came to an end on 12/31/2022, but extended security support will continue until December, 2025.

Further Reading: SUSE lifecycle

 

Oracle Linux

• Previous Updates
  • Oracle Linux 9.2 has completed Minor OS certification on IRIS 2023.1 without incident.
• Further Reading: Oracle Linux Support Policy

 

Microsoft Windows

• Upcoming Changes
  • Windows Server 2025 is expected to be released in Q4.  We’re keeping an eye on it and formulating plans for support.
  • Windows 12 is expected even earlier with a possible GA date as early as June.  We’ll start the process of supporting the new OS after it’s been released.
• Further Reading: Microsoft Lifecycle

 

AIX

• Upcoming Changes
  • We’re planning to only support OpenSSL 3 kits starting with IRIS 2025.1. In IRIS 2023.3 & 2024.1, we provided two separate IRIS kits – one that supports OpenSSL 1 and one that supports OpenSSL 3.  Given the importance of OpenSSL 3 for overall system security, we’ve heard from many of you that you’ve already moved to OpenSSL 3.  If you have concerns about this, please reach out to me directly.
• Previous Updates
  • Minor OS Certification has been completed for AIX 7.2 TL5-06 on IRIS 2023.1.
• Further Reading: AIX Lifecycle

Containers

• Upcoming Changes
  • We are planning to change the base container image from Ubuntu 22.04 to Ubuntu 24.04 with IRIS 2024.2
  • We’re considering changes to the default IRIS container to, by default, have internal traffic (ECP, Mirroring, etc) on a different port from potentially externally facing traffic (ODBC, JDBC, etc).  If you have needs in this area, please reach out and let me know.
• Previous Updates
  • We have started regular updates of IRIS containers with patches to the base container image and third-party dependencies.  IRIS containers that follow the new tagging scheme now have at least every-other-week updates.

 

Minimum Supported CPU Models

To repeat the reminder from Q1’s platforms update, we announced that InterSystems IRIS 2024.1+ has a minimum required CPU functionality standard for Intel/AMD-based systems.  This allows IRIS to rely on certain CPU instruction extensions, such as AVX & BMI, that will result in significantly better performance of certain operations.  For more information, please see my InterSystems IRIS Minimum Supported CPU Models developer community post.

 

InterSystems IRIS Development Operating Systems and CPU Architectures

MacOS

• Previous Updates
  • Apple has released MacOS 14 with IRIS support in IRIS 2024.1

 

InterSystems Components

• Previous Updates
  • InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) 3.7 has been released.
  • InterSystems API Manager (IAM) 3.4 has also been released.

Caché & Ensemble Production Operating Systems and CPU Architectures

• Previous Updates
  • Cache 2018.1.9 was released on February 14. 
  • There are only 3 more maintenance releases of Caché & Ensemble planned.  See  Jeff’s excellent community article for more info.

InterSystems Supported Platforms Documentation

The InterSystems Supported Platforms documentation is the definitive source information on supported technologies.

• IRIS 2024.1 Supported Server Platforms
• IRIS 2023.1 Supported Server Platforms
• IRIS 2022.1 Supported Server Platforms
• Caché & Ensemble 2018.1 Supported Server Platforms

 

… and that’s all folks.  Again, if there’s something more that you’d like to know about, please let us know.